As special counsel Robert Mueller builds his case, relatives of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn are among those pressing the president to use his unique legal power and ‘put these defendants out of their misery.’

On Friday, April 27, 1973, a dozen armed FBI agents left their headquarters in the Old Post Office building — today a gilded Trump hotel — and marched up Pennsylvania Avenue. Waving their badges, they walked into the White House.

Their orders were to stand guard in the West Wing, wherein lay evidence of high crimes. “They’re going to lock down and secure the business offices, including the president’s,” the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Jack McDermott, told an astonished Secret Service man.

Caught in the web of Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon returned from Camp David and found a skinny young FBI man standing at attention down the hall from the Oval Office. Screaming in rage, he grabbed the agent by the lapels. “What the hell is this?” he shouted.

It was the rule of law challenging the power of the commander in chief — and the beginning of the end for Nixon. He knew that he was doomed. Within a year, the president would be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an iron-clad criminal case. His impeachment inevitable, he resigned the presidency in the summer of 1974.

We need to look at why the G-Men have the power and independence to take down the president.

We now stand on the verge of the same kind of confrontation.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, backed by the full force of the FBI, has one foot inside the White House. He will have another if President Trump makes good on his promise to talk with Mueller in a matter of weeks, a pledge the president made on Wednesday to the evident horror of his lawyers. “You fight back,” Trump complained, and the reaction is, “‘Oh, it’s obstruction.’”

Trump tried to fight back last summer. He wanted to fire Mueller, as he had fired FBI Director James Comey. That would have created a constitutional crisis like no other since Watergate — and a clear count of obstructing justice. Any rookie prosecutor could have brought that case to court. And Bob Mueller is no rookie.

Trump wants to go to war with Mueller? A man who faced down George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to protect the constitution from becoming a casualty in the war on terror, a Marine veteran with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star? Trump wants to attack the Justice Department and the FBI when he and his administration are the focus of the most politically charged criminal investigation in half a century?

These would be suicide missions. Ever since Nixon, no president has won a face-to-face battle with the FBI or a special counsel investigating the White House. And Richard Nixon, for all his deviousness and duplicity, was an infinitely more sophisticated political operator than Donald Trump.

Then-U.S. President Richard Nixon, center, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an iron-clad criminal case | Keystone/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Nixon never would have fallen had not FBI agents pursued their investigation despite the fact that their leaders were hopelessly compromised or criminally entangled by Watergate. We would never know how President Ronald Reagan sold arms to Iran as ransom for American hostages had not the FBI used state-of-the-art forensics to salvage slam-dunk evidence from purged White House computer files in 1987. President Bill Clinton never would have faced impeachment for perjury had not the FBI drawn his blood – and secured DNA evidence of his sexual dalliances – in the Map Room of the White House in 1998.

Only the FBI can walk into the White House and compel a president to comply with the law. Only the FBI can build a criminal case against a chief executive. And Trump may not realize he is up against three present and former FBI directors who have proven fearless and fiercely independent when it comes to confronting presidents.

In 2004, Mueller and Comey (then the acting attorney general) stood up to President Bush when he bent the law and the constitution to their breaking point with his secret eavesdropping on Americans. They were prepared to resign on principle. That story is well known. But many forget that the present FBI director, Christopher Wray, then chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department, was prepared to resign with them. He’ll have to be ready to quit in protest again if Trump keeps attacking the hard-won integrity of the Bureau.

Bush was savvy enough to see that the resignations would have destroyed his presidency. He wrote in his memoirs: “I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973,” when Nixon demanded the firing of the Watergate special counsel, forced out the attorney general and the deputy attorney general, sparking a firestorm that consumed him. “That was not a historical crisis I wished to replicate.”

Now that we know Trump was a tweet away from starring in Saturday Night Massacre: The Sequel, we need to look at why the G-Men have the power and independence to take down the president.

* * *

Watergate never would have happened if J. Edgar Hoover had not died six weeks before the break-in. In his 48 years as the head of the Bureau, Hoover had protected presidents he tolerated (like Lyndon B. Johnson) and undermined those he scorned (like John F. Kennedy). He disregarded higher authority — the White House, the Justice Department, the Congress, and the Supreme Court — when he saw fit.

“Attorneys general seldom directed Mr. Hoover,” Nixon said in 1980. “It was difficult even for presidents.” He was testifying at the trial of Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, who had been indicted for warrantless FBI burglaries committed in the Watergate era.

Hoover oversaw hundreds if not thousands of such black-bag jobs in his time. He would not have approved a hare-brained operation like the Watergate caper — but he damned well would have protected his men had they been caught. He had that kind of power. He was the law.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is backed by the full force of the FBI, and has one foot inside the White House | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

In the fall of 1974, a few weeks after Nixon fled, Congress set out to recalibrate the imbalances of power created by the imperious Hoover and the imperial presidency. Following a no-holds-barred inquiry that bared three decades of crimes Hoover and his men committed in the name of national security — often with the tacit approval of presidents — the Senate made a seemingly modest move to give the FBI director a statutory 10-year term.

The aim was twofold. The 10-year sinecure would protect the director from pressure exerted by presidents. He would no longer be a point man in acts of political warfare commanded by the chief executive. At the same time, no director could become another Hoover, an unaccountable autocrat with infinite tenure and unlimited power. This was a balancing test of the kind that Congress no longer seems capable.

The Senate judiciary committee, in a 1976 report, also made it clear the FBI’s chief was not like a member of the Cabinet. He was not a political actor. No president could justify the removal of an FBI director merely because he wanted his own man in the job — and certainly not because the FBI was investigating the White House.

We’ll see if Trump keeps following Nixon’s footsteps down the road to hell.

Thus President Clinton was incapable of firing the FBI’s fifth director, Louis J. Freeh, a man who was investigating him from the day he was sworn in. Freeh’s deep distrust of the president blinded him — but keelhauling him was “a political impossibility,” the National Security Council’s chief counterterrorism aides, Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, wrote in 2002. “A chief executive who was being investigated by the FBI could not fire the FBI director: it would be another Saturday Night Massacre, the second coming of Richard Nixon.” It would also be an obstruction of justice — a high crime, constituting an impeachable offense.

* * *

We’ll see if Trump keeps following Nixon’s footsteps down the road to hell. One year ago Friday, FBI agents interviewed Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn, about his contacts with Russian officials during the presidential transition. Flynn lied. A counterintelligence probe into Team Trump’s ties to Team Putin became a criminal case.

In February, Trump pressured Comey to drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. In March, Trump leaned on CIA Director Mike Pompeo to find a way to make Comey back off — exactly as Nixon leaned on the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate case, an act caught on the “smoking gun tape” that proved to be Nixon’s downfall. And then Trump went ahead and fired Comey — and recorded his own smoking gun tape, an interview with NBC News, in which he said he’d done so with the intent of making the FBI’s Russian investigation disappear.

On March 22, 1973, as the breath of the FBI’s bloodhounds grew hot, Nixon had a heart-to-heart with John Mitchell, the man who’d been his campaign manager, attorney general and criminal co-conspirator. The president concluded that a continuing obstruction of justice was his only recourse. The White House tapes spun silently: “I don’t give a shit what happens,” Nixon said. “I want you all to stonewall it … plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up … We’re going to protect our people, if we can.”

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Vishnou

In Trump’s world, money can buy everything. He may find interested parties to help him achieve his goals, even within the FBI. When a person in charge of highest responsibilities decides to dismantle the establishment the way he does, he/she becomes very popular amongst certain citizens and will get their support. Strangely enough, those people don’t seem to be upset by the outrageous attitude generated by the power of money….. He promised a lot but, despite his sayings, results don’t follow. In remote parts of the US, shutdowns haven’t been stopped, to the contrary. So promises: yes. Achievements? At the NYSE only. Thus, increasing shareholders’ benefits only.

Posted on 1/28/18 | 12:40 PM CET

freddie silver

@ Vishnou,
So much biased ignorance:
Trump has presided over the passage of a tax reform that is already resulting in increased economic activity and the repatriation of funds held overseas by US companies, increasing reserves and jobs, just as promised. The burden of regulation, vastly increased under Obama, is being steadily lightened. The administration is anything but politically correct, and that is a good thing, considering the damage done by political correctness over the preceding eight years.
American policy has been reversed. Instead of attacking friends and supporting enemies, the reverse is now the situation (with the significant exception of abandoning the Iraqi Kurds). Certain European countries are treated with the contempt they deserve while China and Russia (after a quickly aborted honeymoon) are confronted where they need to be.

TwitterVish you will never learn because you have a closed mind and you do not want to.

Posted on 1/28/18 | 4:52 PM CET

ironworker

Sorry, but it will never happen anytime soon … 🙂

Posted on 1/28/18 | 5:16 PM CET

trisul

“Donald Trump wants to fight the FBI? It’s a suicide mission”

He knows he has no choice. If he does nothing, he will be prosecuted for his crimes, if he does something, he might yet survive it.

Posted on 1/28/18 | 5:57 PM CET

Saintixe

Interesting times.

Let’s hope Justice prevails. Bigly. To use somebody own words and may they haunt him.

Posted on 1/28/18 | 6:15 PM CET

Bust Yerballs

Factually speaking there are democratic criminals running around with impunity aiming their politically aligned IRS, FBI and DOJ prosecutors at their opponents. Don’t get me wrong, if Trump has committed material crimes then prosecute but prosecute both sides…please!!!! DRAIN THE SWAMP.

Posted on 1/28/18 | 6:48 PM CET

trisul

If Mueller ask Trump the question:

– Did you try to get me fired?

If Trump says “Yes”, it is proof of obstruction of justice, and he should be impeached.
If Trump says “No”, it is lying under oath, and he should be impeached.

Ergo, Trump will never accept to be questioned by Mueller, he will fight the FBI instead.

Posted on 1/28/18 | 8:45 PM CET

Burgundian

I love how europhiles are drooling over politically-appointed police dominating the elected executive. And we thought that ended with KGB.

yospit64

So, will Trump commit suicide soon? That will be the greatest celebration in the USA and around the world!

Posted on 1/29/18 | 3:28 AM CET

yospit64

Burgundian, in USA we have the electoral college doing exactly that!

Posted on 1/29/18 | 3:32 AM CET

freddie silver

@ trisul,
“…If Trump says “Yes”, it is proof of obstruction of justice, and he should be impeached…”
That is debatable since Mueller is still there and there is no real indication of any Trump action conducive to removing the special prosecutor.
Even assuming that Trump wanted Mueller out, there is no evidence that he did anything.